Sri Lanka vs Notre Dame: 1 to 7

By Nour Rida

Sri Lanka vs Notre Dame a result of 1 to 7; do not mistakenly think this is a football match where Notre Dame team beat the Sri Lankans. This is about two sad events that took place in the first half of April 2019. This is actually about the number of Google searches for France’s Notre Dame Cathedral which was seven times more than that of Sri Lanka in the 24 hours after each respective tragedy.

On April 15, wild fires ravaged the roof of the famous Notre Dame cathedral darkening the skies of Paris with smoke clouds while no human casualties were registered. It was an emotional moment for the Parisians, tourists, as well as many across the world. Less than a week later, terrorist attacks in Sri Lanka took the lives of some 350 people and left more than 500 injured. They were attending Easter mass celebrations in churches and hotels.

Individuals, companies and institutions have so far donated or pledged 845 million euros, about $950 million, to rebuild the damaged cathedral, which dates back to the 12th century and is famous for featuring in Victor Hugo's classic novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. Investigators were questioning witnesses in order to determine the origin of the fire, with initial reports claiming it was arson.

After a special cabinet meeting, France’s Prime Minister Édouard Philippe said there is a five-year goal to rebuild the cathedral which is “obviously an immense challenge,” but also “a historical responsibility.”

Meanwhile, no voices came out saying that the Sri Lanka attacks were a “humanitarian responsibility” and there should be efforts to help out. Do not get me wrong, there is nothing against reconstructing a historical structure, one of the most recognizable structures in Paris. The structure lost most its roof, large parts of its interior stone ceiling and some interior furnishings to the fire, which was a painful scene to the hearts of many. But isn’t seeing children, women and men shredded into pieces while recalling how to live together in love, peace and unity as they joined Christians, worldwide, in celebrating Easter even more painful?

One of the main reasons behind more interest in Notre Dame was the "closer to home" appeal for people from the Western hemisphere. Anything that is “not close enough to home” does not get much attention in Western Media, nor is it represented fairly. It is also not a concern to the people living in the Western hemisphere. Sri Lanka is normally an obscure place in most American and Western eyes. It is not just distance and geography that keeps the Sri Lanka deadly attacks in the dim light. They have dark skin, they are not an English speaking population, and they do not share a similar culture as that of Western countries.

Now even though New Zealand does not belong to the Western hemisphere, it did catch a lot more attention from Western media in comparison to Sri Lanka. The Christchurch mosque shootings were two consecutive terrorist attacks at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, during Friday Prayer on 15 March 2019. Why so? New Zealand constitutes mostly English speaking white population which appeals to the Western audience much more than a non-white inhabitant island of Sri Lanka.

When it is Americans or Westerners killed, we get details on the identity of the victims, how many kids were there among the dead, etc. In fact, while taking no notice of the Sri Lankan victims, US media reported that several US citizens died in the blasts, including a fifth-grader who went to school in Washington.

Ironically, US President Trump seemed ignorant about this small country and the deadly attacks. He deleted a tweet Monday in which he had mistakenly said he had spoken by phone with Sri Lanka’s president instead of the country’s prime minister in the wake of the Easter Sunday explosions. The deleted tweet marked the second time Trump has tweeted erroneous information related to the Sri Lanka attacks. In a Sunday morning tweet that was soon deleted, he grossly overstated the death toll as “at least 138 million people.”

 Such attitude towards terrorist attacks that killed and injured some 900 people highlights the ethical superiority of the West. It also leads to a debate on how world leaders respond to a crisis without any casualties, when money could be raised to help during crises affecting people’s lives and the families of the victims. It could be argued also that Sri Lanka’s relative lack of strategic importance to the western powers was one of the factors for such negligence, even though it sits at the center of the Indian Ocean, likely to be one of the world’s most strategically contested regions in the coming century, is located halfway between China and its energy sources in the Middle East and can be seen in the context of a small power-great power relations in a future multipolar world order.

Given the relatively small and powerless status of this country today, whether on the cultural, racial, geographical, and geopolitical levels, the blood of the Sri Lankans seems to be cheap in the eyes of the “Other”.